Escalations Manager

Crusoe Energy Systems; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health & wellbeing benefits

401(k) match

Mental wellness resources

Job summary

Crusoe Energy Systems seeks an Escalation Manager to own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer-impacting escalations across Support and Engineering. You will drive engagement, track metrics, and collaborate with Product to reduce escalation rates while improving tooling and processes.

Strong data skills and prior SRE/support experience are essential for this role. You will report to the Director, Customer Support Engineering within Cloud Go-To-Market and help build a fast, transparent path from

Qualifications

• 5+ years in technical support, support engineering, escalation management, incident management, or SRE/operations in cloud, infrastructure, or SaaS
• Ability to influence without authority and hold cross-functional teams to commitments
• 2+ years owning escalations or incidents spanning multiple engineering teams
• Experience in fast-growing organizations
• Solid foundation in cloud infrastructure (Linux, networking, virtualization, Kubernetes)
• Track record of reducing escalation volume or resolution time
• Comfort with data: building dashboards and reporting
• Experience with Zendesk, Jira, incident.io, Slack; strong communication
• Experience with GPU compute or HPC networking is a plus
• Background as support engineer or SRE and establishing escalation function

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end lifecycle of escalations from intake to closure
• Coordinate with multiple engineering teams to engage the right engineers
• Maintain a single source of truth for active escalations and incidents
• Publish reports on escalation volume, time to engage, time to resolve and top drivers
• Improve tooling and workflows between support and engineering trackers
• Drive reduction of escalation rate quarter over quarter
• Provide timely status updates to customers, account teams and leadership
• Lead postmortems, runbooks, and knowledge base improvements
• Coach engineers to resolve issues and own escalations
• Join incident response for customer-impacting events and communicate clearly

Skills

Cross-functional influence

Data-driven decision making

Strong communication

Cloud infrastructure knowledge

SLA/incident management

Automation scripting (Python/Bash)

Problem solving under pressure

Tools

Zendesk

Jira

incident.io

Slack

Looker

Tableau

Sheets

Job description

• When something goes wrong for a customer, the path from first report to root cause often crosses several teams: Support Engineering, Product Engineering, SRE, Networking, Storage, and Data Center Operations. As Escalation Manager, you’ll own that path


• Reporting to the Director, Customer Support Engineering, within Cloud Go-To-Market, you’ll be the bridge between Customer Support and Engineering


• You’ll track every escalation and customer-impacting incident from start to finish, make sure the right engineers are engaged and moving, and keep customers and stakeholders informed


• Then you’ll look across all of it to find the patterns, turn them into supportability requests the Product team can act on, and drive the escalation rate down over time


• You’ll work side by side with the Senior Manager, Customer Support, who leads and develops the Support Engineering team


• They build the team’s technical depth; you make sure the path from Support to Engineering is fast, visible, and needed less often. Together, you’ll help support engineers take more ownership of their cases, both before and after they escalated


• Define and maintain escalation criteria, severity definitions, and handoff standards so support engineers know when to escalation, how to escalation, and what an escalation-ready case looks like


• Build and publish reporting on escalation volume and rate, time to engage, time to resolve, aging, and top drivers by product area and customer, for Support, Engineering, and Product leadership to use in their decisions


• Improve the tooling and workflows between the support platform and engineering trackers, such as Zendesk and Jira, so escalations move faster with less manual work


• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of every escalation from Support to Engineering: intake, triage, routing, follow-through, and closure


• Keep a single source of truth for all active escalations and customer-impacting incidents, each with a clear owner, next step, and ETA, so nothing ages without someone noticing


• Own the supportability backlog with Product, track requests through to delivery, and close the loop with the support team on what shipped


• Own escalation rate as a core KPI, set reduction targets with the Director, and lead the initiatives that bring escalation rate and time to resolve down quarter over quarter


• Act as the primary bridge between Support Engineers and Engineering teams, unblocking stalled issues and escalating further when needed


• Run recurring escalation reviews with Engineering to keep aging issues moving


• Join incident response for customer-impacting events: coordinate support-side communication, track affected customers, and make sure follow-ups land after resolution


• Give clear, timely status updates to customers, account teams, and leadership on high-severity and high-visibility issues


• File, prioritize, and advocate for supportability requests with Product, including better logging, diagnostics, observability, error messages, self-service tooling, and internal admin capabilities that let Support resolve issues without Engineering


• Bring the customer’s voice into product planning with data, not anecdotes


• Review escalations regularly to identify recurring issues, product gaps, knowledge gaps, and process breakdowns


• Feed findings into postmortems, runbooks, and knowledge base articles, and partner with the Senior Manager, Customer Support on training that closes the gaps the escalation data reveals


• Coach support engineers to troubleshoot further, own cases end to end, and actively drive their escalations instead of handing them off

Benefits

• Health & wellbeing: Comprehensive health benefits designed to support your overall wellness


• Time away: Paid time off for vacations, family bonding, and unexpected needs


• 401(k) match: Build your financial future with our 401(k) matching program


• Mental wellness: Resources and support for your emotional wellbeing and navigating life’s challenges

• 5+ years in technical support, support engineering, escalation management, incident management, or SRE/operations in a cloud, infrastructure, or SaaS environment


• The ability to influence without authority and hold cross-functional teams to their commitments


• 2+ years owning escalations or incidents that span multiple engineering teams


• Experience in a fast-paced organization going through rapid growth


• A solid technical foundation in cloud infrastructure, including Linux, networking, virtualization, and Kubernetes: enough to read logs, follow a technical investigation, and hold your own with engineers


• A track record of reducing escalation volume or resolution time through process, tooling, or product changes


• Comfort with data: building dashboards and reports (SQL, Looker, Tableau, Sheets, or similar) and turning them into clear recommendations


• Hands-on experience with tools such as Zendesk, Jira or incident.io, and SlackCalm, clear communication under pressure, in writing and live, with customers, engineers, and executives


• Experience with GPU compute, HPC, InfiniBand or RoCE networking, or AI/ML training and inference infrastructure


• A background as a support engineer or SRE before moving into escalation management


• Experience standing up an escalation or problem management function from scratch


• ITIL or other incident and problem management certification


• Scripting or automation skills (Python, Bash) to streamline workflows